Omneon to Transfer Castify Operations to Aspera; Combination Strengthens Product Offering and Aligns Development Efforts With Core Strengths
SUNNYVALE, Calif., and BERKELEY, Calif. — April 18, 2009 — Omneon Inc. and Aspera Inc. today announced that they have agreed on the terms of a broad partnership in which Aspera will acquire the Omneon Castify content distribution business unit and the two companies will collaborate on making CDN solutions more widely available to broadcast and technology markets. Omneon will continue to market the ProCast CDN™ product, with Aspera assuming ongoing development engineering and operational responsibility for the technology, with the goal of creating a more powerful and complete content distribution platform for customers. Aspera expects to integrate its fasp™ transport technology with ProCast CDN and the Omneon APIs to create a highly manageable and high performance solution for moving content between Omneon systems.
“Having Aspera assume management and ongoing development of the Castify products, coupled with the tight integration of Aspera and Castify CDN technologies with Omneon server and storage platforms will result in our ability to provide our customers with the highest performing and most complete solution available for fast, efficient, and reliable content distribution,” said Geoff Stedman, Omneon senior vice president for products and markets. “Aspera is known for providing advanced, high-performance file transfer solutions, and the addition of the Castify team further enhances their ability to develop best-in-class products for content delivery over IP networks.”
The agreement will expand Aspera’s reach in supplying market-leading content delivery solutions and will allow Omneon to continue to focus on providing best-of-breed video servers and media storage platforms, while at the same time ensuring that both company’s products work seamlessly together. This will not only ensure tight integration, but will also enhance customer solutions to support distributed workflows not possible before.
“With the growth of file-based workflows, the demand for a tightly integrated solution for producing, storing, and delivering content across geographically distributed locations will only continue to increase. Our acquisition of Castify combined with our partnership with Omneon, the leading video server and media storage platform in the market today, will enable both of us to deliver the kind of high performance, tightly integrated solutions that customers demand,” said Michelle Munson, co-founder and chief executive officer at Aspera. “The team and product line match up very well with our area of expertise, and we look forward to leveraging our partnership with Omneon to make the platform’s unique content distribution capabilities available to an even broader user base.”
Aspera provides an innovative, high-performance and secure data transfer technology, implemented in software that eliminates the fundamental transport bottlenecks facing today’s file-based workflows and delivery applications. Unlike conventional file transfer technologies that perform very poorly over the WAN, the Aspera fasp technology achieves virtually ideal bandwidth efficiency and maximum end-to-end transfer speeds, regardless of the distance of the endpoints. These gains are maintained across the dynamic conditions of the network and for even the most difficult satellite, wireless, and unreliable international links. Users have extraordinary control over transfer rates and bandwidth sharing, and full visibility into utilization.
The Castify team has created a portfolio of products and technologies providing an end-to-end software solution that enables enterprises and service providers to build scalable, easily managed, and cost-efficient service acceleration and content delivery platforms over the Internet and on Intranets. Taking advantage of advanced reliable IP Multicast, WAN acceleration technology, network management, and bandwidth control, Castify enables organizations to initiate, monitor, and manage the delivery of content either as file transfers, progressive downloads or real-time streams.
Enabling the Castify product line with Aspera technology will result in a portfolio of software solutions that work across existing network infrastructure and enable the easy deployment of a wide variety of mission-critical applications including portal acceleration, eLearning, wide area file delivery, business TV, IPTV, push VOD, hotel VOD, and digital cinema.
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About Aspera
Aspera is the creator of next-generation transport technologies that move the world’s digital assets at maximum speed regardless of file size, transfer distance, and network conditions. Based on its patent-pending fasp™ protocol, Aspera software fully utilizes existing infrastructures to deliver the fastest, most predictable file transfer experience. Aspera’s core technology delivers unprecedented control over bandwidth, complete security, and uncompromising reliability. Hundreds of organizations across a variety of industries on six continents rely on Aspera software for the business-critical transport of their digital assets. Please visit www.asperasoft.com for more information.
About Omneon
Omneon Inc. is a leading provider of scalable media server and active storage systems that optimize workflow productivity and on-air reliability for the production, distribution, and management of digital media. Omneon is a pioneer in the use of advanced IT technologies and open systems for broadcast applications, producing a modular and expandable video server architecture in the Omneon Spectrum. The company’s MediaGrid active storage system delivers centralized content storage that is scalable in capacity, bandwidth, and media-processing power. The company has an extensive global presence with customers in more than 50 countries on six continents. Omneon is on the Web at www.omneon.com.
